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Thursday, September 24, 2009

The good news about my tablet coming home was short-lived. The day after I wrote that, the tech guy in the building came up to my room (in the middle of class) to tell me that he had good news and bad news. Uh oh! The good news was that my tablet had arrived back at the building. The bad news was that he was checking it out and the mousepad (my original problem) still didn't work. He was boxing it back up and sending it back to Toshiba. :( I haven't heard anything since.

I'm hoping that it's back by Christmas.

I really shouldn't complain. If I didn't have a tablet to use then I'd definitely be having issues. I do, however, have a loaner tablet, so things have been proceeding pretty normally (although this one has issues sometimes when I have too much going on). I set up a new folder on the desktop to keep track of all of the stuff I'd normally keep on my C: drive... at quick count, I have almost 125 items in that folder. Wow! A lot of the items are pdf's of Windows Journal notes (I create a .pdf so I can upload it to embedit.in and then post in on my class blogs), but that's still a lot of work done in the last month!

Speaking of Windows Journal... I've abandoned my attempt at using OneNote. I love the idea of it, and it definitely kept me organized. There were just some aspects of it that didn't make it easy to use.

1. You can't scroll easily when writing on a blank sheet. Like if I were giving notes in class and wanted to scroll up so the writing wasn't too near the bottom of the board, it would move everything up and you wouldn't be able to see any writing. For the kids who are still trying to catch up, though, it wasn't a good thing.

2. When you print out a page, the lines don't come along with it. That really stunk. I like to prepare an outline of notes to give to some of my classes, but I didn't like how they don't have the lines to help them out. I did a little bit of research on it and found that there's no easy way to get those lines on the page! Boo.

3. Printing worksheets to it just wasn't pretty. Often I type something up in Word then want to print it to OneNote (now Journal) to write on in class. Maybe I'm being picky, but it just didn't come out nice! I had to re-size documents to make them fit the whole page... then they'd be all pixel-y. If it took up too much of the page I'd lose the title. There just didn't seem to be a nice way to do it all at once!

OneNote just wasn't meant for me. There are some things I miss about it - especially the nice drawing tools available right there on the screen (unlike Journal). If I were a student and had a tablet I would definitely give it a shot! But for me, I think my experiment is over. I'm a Journal girl.

On a different note.... I'm amazed at how busy I've been so far this school year - I just can't seem to catch up! Today's the first day all year that I've been able to sit in the library after school (doing my duty) with nothing to do. It's wonderful! I haven't even opened my Google Reader for several days, though, so everything's not as rosy as it could be. :)

A couple of cool things already have happened today.1. I checked out the "eSolutions" disk from our new Algebra 2 book. You can actually customize the solutions that are shown! Like if I assign #1 - 4, 6 - 10 on a certain page, I can plug in those numbers and just show them. Love it!

2. I just threw together a Jeopardy review for my Algebra 2 kids for tomorrow. Their Chapter 1 test is on Wednesday. What I liked about it is that because I already had the powerpoint format, all I had to do was plug in some questions/answers. Did it in about 30 minutes. Love it again!

Monday, September 7, 2009

I came upstairs to go to bed almost an hour ago and got sucked into Twitter. Dan Meyer posted an interesting question about grocery store lines - Which line would you choose? A line with one cart (of 19 items) or a line with four carts (of 1, 2, 3, or 5 items)? It was cool to see the responses coming in!

Just ran across this joke on twitter user treed's blog. Would be a funny one to show when we talk about interest!

Friday, September 4, 2009

I seriously can't wait to get my tablet back. Seriously. From what I hear, it's been sent back to the manufacturer to get some parts replaced. It took almost a week for the tech guy here to get the box to ship it in. I'm hoping to have it back by Christmas! (Said with only a little bit of sarcasm!)

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Something new to remember:

This is a website with interactive measuring of lines/angles. Would be a good thing to show my Integrated Geometry classes when we get to our geometry chapter (yes, that's singular... we just switched names but not curriculum yet - the parents were all confused about it at Open House last night!).

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

My tablet's been sent away to have some repair work done, so I'm borrowing a fellow math teacher's for the time being (he got a new tablet this year because he's an e-coach). It's killing me! Sure, I have the tablet (which is nice) but I'm missing a lot of the things that I have on my desktop.... and didn't think to save to my network storage before I gave my computer away. :(

One big thing that I'm missing is my inability to use Diigo to save links - I actually e-mailed myself one earlier today! I was just about to do that again when I thought about putting them on here so I can come back to them later.

1. This is a link to an article about Michelle Duggar, who is pregnant with her 19th child. (Can you imagine?! I can't - my two drive me crazy!) The projections near the bottom are funny. It would be something to show my algebra 2 classes when we get to exponential functions.

2. I've been thinking that it might be fun to try out a slide rule with my precalc kids when we do logs. Here's a link to a tutorial (hopefully it'll be a good for a first timer, too!).

3. I discovered last year that my Integrated kids really enjoyed looking at optical illusions. Seriously, they got really excited when I found some new ones. Here's a cool one that Sol at Wild About Math found.

I think that's it for now. I'm sure I'll be adding to this as I'm tablet-less!